Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 6, June 1999

Dear friend, if you had helped me, I should have achieved yet one more victory. Alone and hard pushed by the proximity of the date, I have failed, not however without placing things on such a fooling that the undertaking, if you care to follow it up, has the greatest chance of success.

And you will follow it up, won’t you? We have entered into a mutual agreement which we are bound to honor. It behooves us, within a fixed time, to inscribe in the book of our common life eight good stories, to which we shall have brought energy, logic, perseverance, some subtlety, and occasionally a little heroism. This is the eighth of them. It is for you to act so that it may be written in its proper place on the fifth of December, before the clock strikes eight in the evening.

And on that day you will act as I shall now tell you.

First of all — and above all, my dear, do not complain that my instructions are fanciful: each of them is an indispensable condition of success — first of all, cut in your cousin’s garden three slender lengths of rush. Plait them together and bind up the two ends so as to make a rude switch, like a child’s whiplash.

When you get to Paris, buy a long necklace of jet beads cut into facets and shorten it so that it consists of seventy-five beads of almost equal size.

Under your winter cloak wear a blue woollen gown. On your head, a toque with red leaves on it. Round your neck, a feather boa. No gloves. No rings.

In the afternoon take a cab along the left bank of the river to the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. At four o’clock exactly there will be, near the holy-water basin just inside the church, an old woman dressed in black, saying her prayers on a silver rosary. She will offer you holy water. Give her your necklace. She will count the beads and hand it back to you. After this you will walk behind her, you will cross an arm of the Seine, and she will lead you down a lonely street in the Ile Saint-Louis to a house which you will enter by yourself.

On the ground floor of this house you will find a youngish man with a very pasty complexion. Take off your cloak and then say to him: “I have come to fetch my clasp.”